Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Books - reading

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

10.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

11.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

12.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

14.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

15.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

16.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

17.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

18.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

19.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

20.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

21.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

22.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

23.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

24.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

25.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

26.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

27.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

28.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

29.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

31.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

32.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

33.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

34.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

35.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

36.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

37.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

38.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

39.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

41.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

42.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

43.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

44.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

45.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

46.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

47.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

48.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

49.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

50.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter